


Into The Cuckoo's Nest

by sailsflyseaward



Series: Eyes Like Wildflowers [1]
Category: Spring Awakening - Sheik/Sater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Female Friendship, Gen, Suggestions of domestic abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-01
Updated: 2013-10-01
Packaged: 2017-12-28 04:35:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/987718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sailsflyseaward/pseuds/sailsflyseaward
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summertime in a shifting city. Ilse was never really the pious type.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Into The Cuckoo's Nest

**Author's Note:**

> This was my contribution to the Small Parts Fest on LJ/Tumblr and my first go at writing serious fic for something other than personal flights of fancy. It was challenging, stressful, and I definitely made very audible frustrated noises over it, but I’m so proud of the new life I’ve found in these kids and my only hope is that I made some tiny success somewhere in this that shines brighter than its shortcomings.

They were like Penelope and her maids, but without the weight of prophecy and hierarchy. They were mothered and fathered, told from the start that they were easy to love. Five girls who learned of adventure through grass-stained pastel rompers and scraped knees; who came to know the quickest back alley shortcuts to and from the Gymnasium as well as they knew the perfume of orchids and chrysanthemums. Even when they were babes -- bright-eyed and wordless and ungainly -- they knew, more than the softness of a warm blanket or the susurrus of the brook by Opa Reiniger’s home in the country, that they were, all of them, real. Real and inseparable and startlingly alive.   
  
There was no Ithaca, but there was The Cuckoo’s Nest -- a neighborhood that was in a seeming state of constant flux. The city inhaled and new developments took root, an expanding rib cage of cranes and concrete where spires were no longer erected to saints, but to cell reception. Their childhood songs were punctuated by metal and fire. Their toes touched wildflower meadows and their fingers twined through chain link fences.   
  
They thrived.   
  
Winters found little Thea, the youngest of the girls by three years, standing at attention behind the register at the family bakery, her dark curls barely peeking above the counter while Wendla and Martha gingerly arranged colorfully-iced Lebkuchen in glass containers. Thea’s parents always welcomed the help during the busy Christmas season and the girls’ sweet tooths were looked after when they headed home at dusk -- scarves smelling of nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves -- with boxes of leftover baked goods tucked under their arms. Spring was ambition, the slightest climb in temperature triggering the giddy reopening of slumbering sidewalk patios; it was afternoons spent at the Ostermarkt losing Ilse to stalls of elaborately-painted eggs. Summer meant sitting out on the fire escape in the gloaming, watching neon smudges flicker to life across the city and listening to the tinny strains of music coming from the bar downstairs. Fall was the most anticipated and the most cherished. It was the opening act for the staid winter months, but brought with it bottles of fresh apple juice from the corner vendor and pots of pumpkin soup smoky with diced bacon.   
  
Come to think of it, they weren’t very much like Penelope and her maids at all -- they certainly ate better and feared less.   
  
And Odysseus never came. 

* * *

Saint Corbinian’s stood beyond the city limits. It had probably been a barn of sorts at the start, concerning itself with hay bales and horses before it was gutted to become a house of worship. But the attraction of a church out in the sticks dwindled as the cities grew, so Saint Corbinian’s now stood alone at the start of the country, losing prayers and penitents to hospital beds and the bottom of a glass. Its once proud steeple had crumbled into a stony nub and the entire northwest corner sagged into the earth-- 

  
\--and Ilse was breaking in. Correction: things were certainly going to end up broken, but she had the keys.   
  
"Goddamit," Ilse shook the weathered door knob and gave the key another uninspired turn.   
  
Martha glanced warily behind them, wincing as she noticed, again, the "Betreten verboten!" sign that glowered at them from the edge of the property. "Really, Ilse, of all the things you could say--"  
  
"Fuck." There was a dull creak from the wood as Ilse leaned her shoulder against it and pushed, lifting as she did so; the door shuddered and collapsed inwards. Ilse beamed through the cloud of dissipating dirt and brick dust. "Ernst is in the pastor’s good books -- how else do you think we got these?" She wrenched the keys free and jangled them in front of Martha. "Besides, I’m sure he can put in a good word for both of us regarding... this," she waved her hand dismissively at the less-than-functional looking door before reaching out to grab a hold of her friend’s wrist, leading her enthusiastically into the old church.  
  
It was a single room, its high, angular ceiling all that was left of its original skeleton. The floor underfoot was carpeted with dead leaves and splintered wood beams.   
  
"It’s nice, isn’t it?" Ilse had walked ahead in the gloom with the confidence of one who explored dilapidated buildings frequently.  
  
It  _was_  nice, in a way. Embraced by stone walls and swallowed by the sooty dark, the coolness of the church’s interior was a welcome respite from the heat outside. Ilse was stooped over the end of a pew, prodding it for signs of rot. She was awash in a pool of light from the broken window pane behind her, dust motes swimming in her hair.   
  
"Remember that textile mill fire two years ago?" Martha said. She knelt by Ilse’s pew and traced her fingers over the gryphon and ornate foliage carved into the dark wood.   
  
Ilse sat down and propped her feet on the back of the pew in front of her. "Martha Bess--"  
  
"Ilse, no--"  
  
"Martha Bessel--"  
  
"You know you sound like my mother when you do that," Martha leveled a look of barely-contained long-suffering at Ilse, "and of all the things you could have adopted from her, it had to be the long-windedness. If God is good... Ilse,  _please_ , having this place collapse on us while you try to explain to me that you did not see the warning signs all over that mill and that the gate was ‘conveniently open’ and you ‘heard feline mewls of distress coming from inside’ is not the way I want to go."   
  
"Martha,  _schätzchen_ ," Ilse swung her legs off of the pew and turned to face Martha, "four things: it is not ‘long-windedness’, it’s storytelling -- one inspires snores and bores, the other is my forte and I am hurt that you’d confuse the two; secondly--" she waggled two fingers in Martha’s face, "that fire happened three days after I was there, so I don’t know what the fuss is about; thirdly, it was a dog, not a cat, and fourthly, I never took you for the pious type. Your parents, yeah, but we were in diapers together and I’ve never seen you so twitchy."   
  
Martha frowned. "Papa wouldn’t like it -- something about ‘desecration’. You know how he gets."  
  
"Father doesn’t have to know." Ilse’s lips pulled into that slightly lopsided grin of hers, the one that was equal parts endearing and confounding -- she was so maddeningly unafraid, always had been. Her teachers in the past had been confused, said she was "coping" with the poor marks she brought home with laughter instead of the fat tears that spilled down the faces of other children. But Martha knew better. Ilse was too bright and too wild as a child, found more value in rooftops and abandoned spaces than she did in her schoolbooks. Not much had changed since then -- she did enough to keep the adults pleased and to keep a roof over her head.   
  
"Hey," Ilse shifted so she was seated normally in the pew, "remember when I sat for that art student from the University?"   
  
"Mmhmm."   
  
"He still doesn’t know."  
  
"But won’t he find out? It’s been a month." Martha’s brow furrowed in concern. Herr Neumann was keen on rooting out whatever it was he needed to know.   
  
Ilse shrugged. "I don’t doubt it. He’ll go red in the face and he might even try to get a list of all the applicable students enrolled at the university -- which won’t be given to him -- and then soon enough he’ll go downstairs and he’ll forget. He always forgets. As I said, father doesn’t have to know." She straightened then and dusted herself off before inhaling noisily, her cheeks inflating.  
  
Martha rolled her eyes in mock exasperation and got to her feet. Her back was turned when Ilse took her by the shoulder and turned her around.  
  
"Take a deep breath." Ilse was breathless and looked thoroughly pleased with herself.  
  
"Are we actually doing this now..." Martha huffed, but relented. She could hear her heart drumming in her ears as she held her breath, the empty church suddenly cavernous in its capacity for silence.   
  
"You see?" Ilse nudged Martha’s shoulder with her own as the latter exhaled. "Can’t feel that back home, you know, can’t hear a single thing." Not with the flurry of jackhammers from the new parking garage down the street; not with their neighbor’s soaps seeping through the walls of their apartment; not with the sound of heavy feet dragging up the stairs, of glass missing the trash can rim and clattering on tile instead. 

* * *

The bars were still warm when Ilse leaned back against them, a bowl of figs balanced on her knee. What remained of the day was a distant, darkening strip of orange muddied with purple, like a bruise. There was something to be said for the fire escape, her own little steel grate St. Corbinian’s suspended above the streets. Ilse remembered sleeping out on it when her room was too stuffy or when the walls seemed too thin.  
  
And, in the grey light of morning when the world had yet to stir, with her bare arms crossed on the dewy railing, it was almost sacred.


End file.
